Previous sections described the NAND architecture from the basic NAND
cell to a packaged component. This section begins to integrate the
controller into the picture. Without a controller, the NAND is a relatively
unintelligent storage device.
The reason for the controller function is to manage the NAND components
and create a standard interface which communicates well with host
systems. There are many popular interfaces today such as Serial ATA
(SATA), SD, MMC, USB, PCIe as well as Parallel ATA (PATA, aka IDE).
All of these SSD interfaces have a common controller architecture design
in which a controller resides between the NAND memory and the host
system. In future articles we will look at the tasks a controller handles, but
here we focus on the basic architecture of a generic Solid State Drive (SSD).